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Tuesday, 29 December 2015

The
ITV production Harry Price: Ghost Hunter,
screened on 27 December, turned out to be about as good as I thought it would
from the pre-publicity: the acting was generally fine and the locations and
costumes were nice. The weaknesses were
in the concept and the script. The
continuity announcer seemed a little excessive when he proclaimed theatrically
that it concerned the man who ‘went by the name of Harry Price, Ghost Hunter’,
but he set the tone for what followed. Initially
shown conducting a fake séance, Harry mends his ways when a troubled young
soldier commits suicide in front of him on his doorstep. He is later asked to look into a disturbing
case: Grace, the wife of up and coming Liberal MP Edward Goodwin, had been
found wandering naked in public and is complaining of experiencing delusions,
including that of a ghostly boy, in their sprawling home. If Harry cannot find a plausible explanation
for the incidents Grace may be committed to an institution at the insistence of
Edward’s party in order to save his political reputation. The Goodwin family maid Sarah is seconded to
assist Harry, much to her displeasure.

The
story is probably set in 1920, as near the beginning Harry walks past
pedestrians wearing surgical masks, a scene probably designed to evoke the
post-war flu pandemic which had finished by the end of 1920. There is a reference to the Unemployment
Insurance Act, which came into existence in the same year. It is certainly no later than 1922 because the
coalition government is mentioned, and Lloyd George’s peacetime coalition was
in power until October of that year. Home Rule for Ireland is referred to, which
would make it earlier than the establishment of the Irish Free State, also in
1922. Harry breaks into a bogus
demonstration of mediumship and gives a cold reading to a bereaved mother during
which he says she lost her son, presumably in the war, a year or two before. So far so authentic, though one would expect
to see more disabled and destitute war veterans on the streets so soon after
the end of hostilities.

The
psychical research aspect is sympathetically treated. The real Price certainly enjoyed his gadgets,
and Harry employs a battery of these around Edward’s house. There are moments which bring to mind cases,
notably the writing on the floor which links to the Borley wall writing. Instances of internal bells sounding when
there is nobody to ring them are known in the literature, for example the 1887
Dixon case, reported in Proceedings of
the Society for Psychical Research.*
One wonders exactly how using Graphophones would help when there was no
automatic method of starting them (notwithstanding which Sarah hears Grace
speak on one when she plays it back), and Harry’s explanation to Edward of how
he uses his kit seems more appropriate to the modern ghost-hunting period. Harry forgets to black out the windows when
making photographic prints, though he still gets excellent results.

Despite
the efforts to provide historical context and authenticity, the whole thing
feels routine. For a start the clichéd
unscrupulous (but with a soft heart really)
journalist-on-the-lookout-for-a-scoop depiction of Vernon Wall, in reality the Daily Mirror reporter whose articles did
much to publicise the Borley Rectory case, seems to be modelled on Ripper Street’s one-eared hack Fred
Best. Sarah takes a standard journey
from hostile opposition to what she sees as Harry’s charlatanism, rooted in her
mother’s financially disastrous obsession with Spiritualism, to liking him,
with the hint of a budding attraction between them by the end. The bond is cemented when Harry, in a means
justifying the ends ploy, feeds her mother a ‘message’ from her dead father to
allow her mother to move on. This is one
piece of fraud of which Sarah approves. To
prevent the audience regarding her as an appendage to Harry we learn that she
drove an ambulance during the war so is an independently-minded woman fallen on
difficult times. Fortunately for the
plot Harry’s wife Cora is dead, having expired in an asylum, a fate that
simultaneously renders him sensitive to Grace’s plight, makes the audience
sympathetic towards him because of his guilt, indicates his sincerity in what
he is now doing, and leaves open the possibility of romance with Sarah. In reality Price’s wife Constance (Connie)
outlived her husband but it wouldn’t have been dramatically advantageous for the
fictional Harry to have a wife.

Edward’s
home looks too grand to have been a workhouse, and the photograph of its
inmates we see shows only children, suggesting that it was actually an
orphanage. Calling it that though would
have been an unwelcome reminder of the 2007 Spanish film The Orphanage with its own complement of ghost children. There is
the hint that, despite the suggestion Grace could have heard about the death of
a little boy during the workhouse years and hallucinated him in her drugged
state, the boy’s ghost she sees is real because Sarah sees him as well, but
then Sarah could be suffering a concussion, having banged her head after
Edward’s assault. The door to the
unknown is ajar even when the mystery has apparently been wrapped up and a
non-paranormal explanation accepted.

There
were humorous touches, such as the sinister Liberal party fixer Sir Charles
informing Harry that he had been chosen for his ‘particular set of skills’,
surely a nod to Taken, though Rafe
Spall is a long way from being an action hero.
At a political meeting Edward informs his audience ‘we are all in this
together’, as bogus a sentiment then as it is when the Tories use the phrase
today. These moments are quietly done
and do not intrude self-consciously on the drama.

What
does intrude is that enormous liberties have been taken with the historical
Harry Price (who would probably have loved the programme, though his wife might
not have been as happy). For the
historian the problem is that public understanding is filtered through media
representations. Does this much matter
as it is only entertainment? After all,
naturally Harry here is a non-smoker, in fact nobody smokes; any non-smoking
depiction of the period shown on television has to be phoney but we accept this
manipulation and it doesn’t dent our enjoyment when we are aware of such
anachronisms. Unfortunately, as much as
one would like to think of history as a self-correcting process, there is a
real possibility that those who see this will go away with the misapprehension
that Price really did make a living as a fake medium until a young solder shot
himself on the doorstep, thereby starting Harry’s career as a debunker, and
that he really did entrust his chemical analysis to the fake-voodoo practising
Albert.

The
credits indicate that the programme is based on Neil Spring’s book, and Spring
himself claimed in his promotional activities that ‘Tonight a long awaited
dream comes true. At 9pm, ITV will air Harry
Price: Ghost Hunter, the chilling adaptation of my début novel, The Ghost Hunters.… As an author, having your work adapted for
the screen is an honour, but especially so when it is done to such a high
standard as this.’ That’s almost a
trading standards issue because apart from sharing some characters (Harry,
Sarah and Vernon) it bears no relationship to the book’s plot. In fact, what all this has to do with Spring
is a puzzle. The script wasn’t written
by him but by Jack Lothian, so all Spring has contributed to the ‘adaptation’
is the fictional character Harry Price as a peg, doing things the historical
Price never did, and a couple of other characters, one real (Vernon) and one
fictional (Sarah), both changed from the novel. Fortunately for him, Spring is off the hook
and Lothian has to take responsibility for the script’s weaknesses. For me, the worst thing about the programme
is that I correctly predicted the identity of the villain before even seeing
it, partly because the teaser synopses released by ITV put me in mind of
Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight. I had been half-joking but was confident I
was right when Edward gratuitously comments that his father had been a chemist
and he had studied it himself.

The
key weakness is that the producers want it both ways. They are trading on the Harry Price
connection, which is guaranteed to provide a ready-made audience of Price fans,
of which there are a great number even if many do not really know much about
the historical character and are now misinformed. Yet as I have pointed out previously, for all
this has to do with the real Price it might as readily have been called Fred Bloggs: Ghost Hunter. That would have been more honest but offered the
ITV publicity department less to work with.
I expect the series the one-off was set up to be the pilot for will be
commissioned, but the scriptwriters will have to improve considerably on this
effort to bring the plots up to match the rest of the production values.

Monday, 14 December 2015

Lexscien, or to give it its full title
Lexscien: Library of Exploratory Science, is best known as the online home of
the Society for Psychical Research’s publications – its Proceedings, Journal, and
magazine Paranormal Review (plus Paranormal Review’s earlier incarnation The Psi Researcher).It also carries a number of other
publications: the Journal of
Parapsychology (which is available free to members of the Parapsychological
Association); Research in Parapsychology;
the Journal of Scientific Exploration
(all issues older than two years are free on the Society for Scientific
Exploration’s website); and the European
Journal of Parapsychology (which ceased publication in 2010 and for which
all issues from 2004 to 2010 are free on its website, with the long-term aim of
adding the rest back to its foundation in 1975). Despite being listed as
‘coming soon’, the Institut Métapsychique International’s La Revue Métapsychique seems to be there already.

Also ‘coming soon’ (though ‘soon’ in
Lexscien’s world appears to be a somewhat flexible concept because their status
has been so designated for rather a long time) are the Journal of Exceptional Human Experience and Parapsychology Abstracts International. As the list of journals suggests, Lexscien
works with a range of partners apart from the SPR: the Rhine Research Center;
the Parapsychological Association; the Society for Scientific Exploration, and
the ex-editors of the European Journal of
Parapsychology. When (or perhaps if)
the forthcoming publications appear on Lexscien, the Exceptional Human Experiences
Network will join the list (founded by the late Rhea White, it is now run by
the Parapsychology Foundation and said to publish the Journal of Exceptional Human Experience and Parapsychology Abstracts International, though the EHEN website
looks dormant). Enquiries to the
Parapsychology Foundation to learn more of the timescale for the publications’
inclusion failed to elicit a response.
There are also some books on the site: Frederic Myers’ Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily
Death (1903), Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore’s Phantasms of the Living (1886), and
Eugene Osty’s Supernormal Faculties in
Man (1923).

On the face of it this is quite an
impressive roster, albeit duplicating some items freely available elsewhere,
but there are drawbacks to the Lexscien site.
The SPR publications constitute by far the most significant element of
Lexscien, to the extent that it may be assumed that Lexscien is an arm of the
Society. However, it is a
privately-owned service, the owners operating as C-FAR, The Centre for
Fundamental and Anomalies Research. This
is essentially David and Julie Rousseau: David Rousseau is listed on the C-FAR
website as ‘Projects Director’ and Julie ‘Development Director’, with the rest
of the ‘research team’ being Dr Zofia Weaver, Dr Richard Broughton, Dr Ed May,
Adrian Ryan and Mary Rose Barrington.

Strangely Julie and David Rousseau (at the
moment – these things have a habit of changing when flagged up) list themselves
on the Lexscien page devoted to C-FAR as financial supporters of C-FAR, along
with a number of others, as if C-FAR were an entity independent of them. The organisation is registered at Companies
House (Company number 04352039) with Dr David Rousseau as Secretary and
Director, and Julie Rousseau as Director.
The company accounts are available to view online but are singularly
uninformative and look to the untutored eye more like a tax reduction vehicle
than the statements of an organisation actively engaged in anomalies research. Lexscien is not included as a separate income
stream on C-FAR’s annual statements even though appearing on C-FAR’s website as
one of its projects. Nor does income
from C-FAR appear in the SPR’s Annual Report and Accounts, at least not as a
separate item. Despite this reciprocal
opacity, the SPR’s 2013-14 Annual Report noted that £11,600 had been given to C-FAR to update and upgrade Lexscien. Perhaps it would have been wise to insist on
some kind of open accounting of any monies owed first before handing over such
a large sum. C-FAR may be
not-for-profit, as the Lexscien overview states, but that declaration does not
seem to have been tested.

SPR members are entitled to free use of
Lexscien as part of their Society membership, but generally it is a
subscription site, and is not particularly cheap. There are two types of subscription,
affiliate and standard, costing £18 and £85 per annum respectively. The affiliate rate is available to members of
partner organisations who wish to use the rest of the Lexscien site. This is certainly cheaper than individual subscriptions
to those publications it carries that have to be paid for but is still quite
expensive. The Lexscien ‘pricing’ page
states that: ‘At least 65% of proceeds are distributed to the participating
organisations, and the rest is (sic) used to expand and improve the
library.’ However, the FAQ answer to the
question ‘Can I choose which organisation benefits from my subscription?’ is
more complicated:

‘Not directly. C-FAR takes no more than 35% of
gross proceeds to cover the cost of running and expanding the library. Half of
the remaining 65% is then divided between the organisations in proportion to
the number of pages of literature they have put into the library. The other
half is divided in proportion to the pages viewed by users. The net proceeds
from downloads are passed directly to the organisation that supplied the
downloaded material. This means that the supplier of the literature that is
used most, benefits most, although everyone gets a share.’

That sounds like quite a lot of money
should be heading the SPR’s way as it is by far the largest ‘partner’. How much remains to be seen. In the meantime funds are going the other
way. The £11,600 the SPR gave was a
useful boost for Lexscien because there had been complaints about its ease of
use with newer browsers, and until that point SPR publications only went up to
2008. However, there is no
acknowledgement of the SPR’s grant on the Lexscien home page, nor any reference
to grants/donations that might have come from other partners (and if none did
the question arises, why only the SPR when improvements to Lexscien benefited
all partners?), nor any indication of how far behind other publications
are. Also, the quality of many of the
pages is still poor and little, or more likely no, effort has been made to
clean up defective scans that introduced noise and which hamper searches of the
database.

Bearing in mind how long the SPR update
took, and how long the coming soon’ publications have been forthcoming with no
appearance yet in sight, it seems that there is little incentive for the owners
of Lexscien to expand the content further.
I have suggested to Lexscien’s owners a couple of times that the SPR’s Frederic
W. H. Myers Memorial Lectures, which were produced as booklets (see appendix
below), be added to the online library but did not receive a reply. Which I suppose is fair enough – in Boston Matrix
terms Lexscien is a cash cow and ticks along nicely, and if market growth is
low why bother to make the investment?
It is a matter of perspective – by contrast The International
Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals sees
its digitisation programme as a mission, and works on a shoestring; I suspect
its board would love to be given £11,600, considering the huge amount they do
on much less; and Lexscien isn’t expanding, that money was just to stand still.

Looking at the way Lexscien is run, it
is a shame the SPR went down this route, effectively ceding control of its own
property, but it was a canny move by the C-FAR directors, especially as the
source material, for the SPR element at least, was donated by SPR members. The problem is that even a
ring-fenced online library is seen as an asset for the SPR (though
unquantifiable) as it acts as an incentive for membership. It looks like the SPR is locked into an
unfavourable deal unless it decides to start again, and given the size of the
job, and as David and Julie Rousseau are both SPR Council members, that is an
unlikely proposition. In the meantime
other SPR publications such as the Myers Memorial Lectures, the newsletter that
preceded ThePsi Researcher, and many ad-hoc booklets, languish in limbo. C-Far may be doing well out of the
arrangement with its partners, but can the same be said for the constituency it
is supposed to serve?

Appendix

The following SPR publications would be
valuable additions to a properly-conducted online library, but none of which is
at present, as far as I am aware, available electronically. I doubt if this is a comprehensive list but
it gives an idea of some of the publications issued by the SPR that exist in
limited quantities, largely unavailable to serious researchers interested in
the Society’s history and the evolution of the subject. They are worth preserving in an online SPR
archive even where they have been superseded by later research:

The
Society for Psychical Research: Its Rise & Progress & a Sketch of its
Work,
by Edward T. Benett (R. Brimley Johnson, 1903).

Telepathy
and Allied Phenomena,
by Rosalind Heywood, with a section on quantitative experiments by S. G. Soal
(1948).

The
Society for Psychical Research: An Outline of its History, by W. H.
Salter, edited with a new section and a bibliography by Renée Haynes (1970;
first published 1948). The 1948 edition
replaced The Society for Psychical
Research: What it is, what it has accomplished, why its work is so important,
no author, 1945.

SPR
Newsletter (36
issues, 1981-91, edited for most of that time by Susan Blackmore).

Tests
for Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis: An Introductory Guide, by John L.
Randall (n.d.)

Hints
on Sitting with Mediums, by E.O, D.P and W.H. S. [Edward Osborn, Denys
Parsons and W. H. Salter] (1950; this replaced an earlier leaflet, and was
further revised in 1965 by D.P, R.H.T and A.G [Denys Parsons, Robert Thouless
and Alan Gauld]).

‘Spirit’
Photography,
by Simeon Edmunds (1965). [The complete text of ‘Spirit’ Photography (1965) was reprinted as part of an issue of the
Journal of the London Institute of
’Pataphysics, number 12, February 2016.
It is accompanied by illustrations of photographs taken by some of those
Edmunds mentions.]

*The first edition of Trance Mediumship (1950) contains three
appendices – ‘Personal Control in Trance Sittings’ by C. Drayton Thomas and ‘Telepathy
from the Sitter’ by Mrs Kenneth Richmond [Zoë Richmond], plus a reading
list. The 1962 revision replaced all
three appendices with a new one written by Margaret Eastman. Probably between 1965 and 1968 Salter’s 1950
original was reissued and it entirely ignored Eastman’s revisions, reinstating
the three original appendices. Margaret
Eastman’s short-lived version is now scarce.
The 1965-8 date for Trance
Mediumship is suggested by the fact that the SPR republished its booklets
in a uniform design with white gloss card covers during that period: ‘Spirit’ Photography and Hints on Sitting with Mediums in 1965
and Notes for Investigators of
Spontaneous Cases in 1968. Like Trance Mediumship, Tests for Extrasensory Perception was reissued without a date, but
contained the text of the 1954 revision.

SPR Study Guides

These were originally issued in 1980 in
plain white paper covers, and were later reissued in stiff coloured card covers. Series editors were Francis Hitching and
Hilary Evans. An extensive list of
guides was envisaged but the costs of the project proved controversial and only
the first five seem to have been issued (and there is some doubt about the
second as no copies at all are extant as far as I can tell):

1 PSI
in the laboratory: 12 Crucial Findings, by Francis Hitching.

2 Glossary
of Terms Used in Parapsychology, by Michael Thalbourne.**

3 Apparitions,
by Andrew MacKenzie.

4 Books
on the Paranormal: An Introductory Guide, by Nicholas Clark-Lowes.

5 Reincarnation,
by David Christie-Murray.

**I have not seen a copy and it may have
been dropped as the first edition of Michael A. Thalbourne’s A Glossary of Terms Used in Parapsychology
was published by Heinemann as part of its SPR centenary series in 1982. On the other hand so was Andrew MacKenzie’s Hauntings and Apparitions, and his study
guide was definitely published.

Thursday, 10 December 2015

Lists of the allegedly best British
novels crop up from time to time but the most recent poll (7 December 2015)
gives us ‘The 100 greatest British novels’ as seen by foreign critics. Jane Ciabattari, who contributes to BBC
Culture, asked critics ‘from Australia to Zimbabwe’, but not the UK, to
nominate their favourite British novel.
According to the BBC Culture article, she polled 82 critics, but it
seems more likely that that was the number who responded. The terms of reference were specific. As Ciabattari puts it: ‘This list includes no
nonfiction, no plays, no narrative or epic poems (no Paradise Lost or Beowulf),
no short story collections (no Morte D’Arthur) – novels only, by British
authors (which means no James Joyce).’

That seems reasonable, and there is
a little about the critics as well:

‘The critics we polled live and
work all over the world, from the United States and continental Europe to
Australia, Africa, Asia, India and the Middle East. Some of the critics we
invited to participate are regular book reviewers or editors at newspapers,
magazines or literary blogs – Lev Grossman (Time), Mary Ann Gwinn (Seattle
Times), Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper), Mark Medley (Toronto Globe and Mail), Fintan
O’Toole (The Irish Times), Stephen Romei and Geordie Williamson (The
Australian), Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal) and Claiborne Smith (Kirkus
Reviews). Others are literary scholars,
including Terry Castle, Morris Dickstein, Michael Gorra, Carsten Jensen,
Amitava Kumar, Rohan Maitzen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Nilanjana Roy and Benjamin
Taylor. Each who participated submitted a list of 10 British novels, with their
pick for the greatest novel receiving 10 points. The points were added up to
produce the final list. The critics
named 228 novels in all. These are the top 100.’

The first sentence sounds
comprehensively global, but we are not given a breakdown by region. The set of names, if representative, answers
one question I had, but poses another. A
concern had been that critics would have been reading the books in translation,
which raises the issue of availability, the danger that only selected titles have
been translated into that particular critic’s language and skewing the sample
in favour of a narrow range of classic titles; that is aside from the
possibility that the evaluation of a book is affected by the competence of the
translation. That was not the case, as
judging by the names listed they would generally have been reading the books in
English. The fact that they were though creates
an anglophone bias; there is no indication here of how many respondents primarily
spoke a language other than English. How
many of them were German, French, Italian, or Igbo for that matter? How big was the Latin American contingent? This is a selection of mostly
English-speaking critics (and some academics), probably those who could respond
to Ciabattari’s invitation emailed in English.

Considering the statistically
dubious start, the resulting 100 titles are generally familiar, with a few
surprises thrown in. Middlemarch comes out on top, and I can
see why a group of foreign critics would consider it a quintessentially English
novel (Daniel Deronda is also present
further down). Middlemarch won by a ‘landslide’, with 42% of the critics including
it. That and numerous others sound the
sorts of books that appear in university English literature courses, probably where
a lot of these were read.

Female authors are well represented
throughout and take the top three slots, Virginia Woolf punching above her
weight at numbers two and three with To
the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway
respectively. I like both those
enormously, but if you locked me in a room and threatened me with death if I
didn’t name the writer of the second and third greatest British novels, I can’t
imagine Woolf would immediately spring to mind. The
Waves and Orlando also make the
list. Naturally the Victorians are
heavily represented, particularly in the top half, with Dickens (Great Expectations, Bleak House and David
Copperfield) in the top ten, along with Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair. Dickens also has Dombey and Son, not normally considered one of his finest, on the
list. Austen appears four times,
otherwise the pre-Victorians are fairly sparse – Frankenstein
(in the top ten), The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Clarissa,
Gulliver’s Travels, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe.

Some of the entries one suspects
are better known from their film adaptations and that may have led them to be
top of mind (Atonement, Never Let Me Go – not even Ishiguro’s
best, let alone in the top 100 British novels – and The Buddha of Suburbia stand out in that respect). The presence of The Remains of the Day compensates for Never Let Me Go. There are
some curious choices, including for my money the tedious Under the Volcano, and recent books that have not had the chance to
establish a consensus on their value (four date from 2011-12). Jeanette Winterson and Zadie Smith both
appear twice – does that make them among the most significant British novelists
who have ever lived, and will their reputations stand the test of time? Some plumb the depths of obscurity, such as
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Jane
Gardam’s Old Filth. On the other hand it is nice to see titles which
deserve to be better known, such as Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy, Henry Green’s Loving
and (Dublin born) Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the
Heart.

Anyway, what criteria do you use to
decide on how ‘great’ something is? Is
it how it moves you, how it lingers in the memory, was it something that stayed
with you from a formative period, was it influential on the literature that
followed (in which case how does one assess fairly recent novels?); is how much
it has been written about by previous critics a useful guide, or the extent to
which it has captured the zeitgeist, how ‘real’ it seems, how ingenious the
plot, how subtle the characterisation, how fresh its view of the world…. Taking all these potential elements of
greatness into account the value of such a list must be dubious, but if it
sparks discussion, and encourages readers to try something they hadn’t thought
about before, it has to be worthwhile.

Of course I went through and totted
up the ones I had read, and was a little embarrassed at how many I have yet to
get round to, and there were more than a couple of which I had never even heard.We can grouse about novels we deem less worthy
included at the expense of writers who have been omitted or underrepresented,
or about writers who are represented by what we consider to be the wrong
book(s), and there are a few of all those in this list, but it is still an
interesting snapshot of what springs to mind when critics put their collective
feet up with a cup of coffee and jot down what at that moment they think are
their top (however defined) British novels.Sometimes it helps to have an outsider’s perspective to refresh our
own.With all its flaws they have
nominated a collection of novels to be proud of, as well as a timely incentive
to pull my finger out and cross a few more off my list of those books I really
should get round to reading.

Overview

Over the last few years I have written a large number of pieces, mainly reviews on aspects of the paranormal and of visual culture, but many are no longer available. This blog format is a convenient way of putting my bibliography online and adding some of the old items, plus the occasional new one.

A Note on Titles of Publications

The British and Irish Skeptic is now The Skeptic

The Newsletter of the Society for Psychical Research became The Psi Researcher and then The Paranormal Review

Many of the later items are available online, notably those written for nthposition and the SPR website. Those for The Psi Researcher, Paranormal Review and SPR Journal are available in the SPR's online library; see http://www.spr.ac.uk/ for details.